Terry Marotta: Out of the mouths of babes

It’s always a tightrope-walk when you’re in the company of small children with their sharp eyes and minds.

Terry Marotta

It’s always a tightrope-walk when you’re in the company of small children with their sharp eyes and minds.

When I’m driving alone with my little grandson, he often says, “Sing for me, TT!” -- by which he means recite him some poems.

I’ve come to love riding around with him for the fun we have, though he did surprise me on our summer vacation, when, cruising along the Savannah Highway in South Carolina, he suddenly said, “Dying is really fun!” -- then immediately afterward asked if God pees in the sky.

Now I was happy to kick around this second question, which I took to mean, “Does anyone have a body in the afterlife?” -- but that first assertion of his? It really got me wondering.

It’s true we had recently felt the brush of death’s dark wing. At the airport we took off from, loudspeakers kept announcing the assembly-place for the many firefighters arriving from all over the country to help bury two of their own. Eerily, too, we had just passed the burned-out building where more than four times as many of these valiant brethren had recently perished. “Remember the Charleston Nine,” the improvised sign out front had read, but this child can’t read. This child is only 3.

Then months later at suppertime on a day shortly before Christmas, he and I were again alone in the car making the short drive from my house to his when we encountered a fatal accident. Fatal I knew because idling beside the ruined vehicle was a hearse, a word I neither spoke aloud nor defined for him.

Still, he saw the flashing lights and the grave policeman directing us toward the detour and seemed to draw some inner conclusion. When we pulled into his parents’ driveway, he looked out into the darkness and said, “We don’t have accidents in our family, do we, TT?”

And now, here in the new year, we have encountered death a third time: Again I was driving him home when we were suddenly stopped short by the flashing lights of three squad cars, and yet another policeman beckoning pedestrians into a crosswalk.

“What’s happening?” he said with alarm, and I didn’t know myself until we were passing this place with its line of quietly waiting people out front. I told him it was a funeral home, and when he asked what that was, I explained that when you die, your friends all gather to comfort your family.

“And are YOU there when they come?” he asked, which would have steered us back toward that same God-in-the-sky question -- had he not suddenly seen the uniformed men standing at attention on either side of the doorway.

“But look at those men’s hats! They’re not policemen!”

No, they were not policemen. They were young soldiers forming an honor guard at their dead comrade’s wake.

And when he then asked what a soldier was, I could only speak of how they protect us and left it at that.

Maybe he sensed my sadness, because very soon after, we passed a white unmarked cargo van.

“That’s the Died Bus,” he sadly intoned.

“Oh, honey, you and your imagination!” I laughed to try adding a note of levity.

But if I had had my wits about me more, I might have “sung” something else then: Henry Van Dyke’s wonderful “Parable of Immortality,” where he speaks of the ship of the soul, and the cry of “there she goes!” that arises here on this near shore at the moment of death; and those waiting on the far shore “ready to take up the glad shout, ‘Here she comes!’”